The Marketer's Handbook: Reassessing Marketing Techniques for Modern Business

GAP MODEL

Application: Diagnosis of Client Service Issues, Development of Service Strategy

The Concept

This model (see Figure G.1) is a method of diagnosing difficulties with service quality and analysing the source of potential improvements. It was designed and proposed by a group of academics (Parasuraman et al., 1985) who specialize in service marketing studies. It is built on the assumptions that:

• Quality and customer satisfaction is a comparison between the delivery that customers expect to receive and performance they perceive they receive. Satisfaction depends on the degree to which the two match (or not).
• Customers find service quality more difficult to evaluate than product quality because they have few tangible clues so must rely on other evidence of the quality they are likely to receive.
• Quality evaluation by buyers depends on outcomes and processes. Quality can be influenced by technical outcomes and functional or service outcomes. It can also be influenced by physical aspects of the service and by company image as much as by the interaction with service staff.

Figure G.1: The Gap model

The original investigation to substantiate the model was conducted in financial and product repair services. It has, however, been widely tested and developed since. It identifies and ...